


A Short Midori Drabble

by masksarehot



Series: The Cave AU [10]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 23:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/779026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masksarehot/pseuds/masksarehot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cave Fragments series. Set in the early days of "From the Ashes". Poppy tea to hide the pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Short Midori Drabble

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning: opiate abuse, infertility, vague suicidal ideation

 

The first sip is so bitter that she almost sets the cup down, but then she realizes how badly she needs it. She is still hunched over the ache. Cradling it, like it is a child, and she is its mother — but that thought only reminds her that she can never be a mother, anyway. She can only give birth to pain.

But the drug can soothe that pain, can drown it, wash it away. She tosses back the entire cup.

As she waits, she closes her blurring eyes. The eyelids don’t seem to fit right over the swollen, aching orbs, and they scratch like sandpaper. At this point, she doesn’t know if the illness or the cure is the cause, but she can’t escape either, anyway, so what does it matter?

At first, she only feels the slow warming in her esophagus, the burn on the roof of her mouth. The pain in her abdomen dwarfs all of it, a pulsating throb. It feels as if someone has buried wire brushes beneath her skin and is applying pressure, trying to sink and scrub them through the muscle itself; the muscles cramp and ache as if resisting it. The pain radiates and settles places it shouldn’t: her limbs, her head. Every joint of her hands is sore, so sore that she almost can’t grip the cup, and so she sets it down. When she is sitting, the pain settles in her pelvis – even though it’s far from the source – but if she lies down, she fears she will never get up again. Her life is that precariously balanced.

She waits, and waits.

It starts as a lack of caring. She still feels the pain, but she doesn’t care. She feels the scratch of eyelid on cornea, but she doesn’t care. She realizes that the drug she is flirting with is strong enough that it could kill her, but she doesn’t care. It’s pulling her away from herself, making her an observer of her own body. She doesn’t like what she sees – a weak woman, a slave to her body – but the dislike is entwined with a warm glow, and so it is comfortable.

Maybe that’s why she needs this so much: it’s the only time she is comfortable with her pain, her failure, her flaws.

As time passes, the glow spreads, balming her knuckles and her fingertips with that delightful lack of caring. She begins to itch – her scalp, her arms, her neck – and it is unpleasant, but more bearable than caring about all that pain, so she can tolerate it.

Her eyelids part and the world around her is dimmed in haze, lights bleeding into their surroundings. She lifts a lazy hand toward the ceiling and rotates it, admiring the halo that forms around it. This hand may be aching, and itching, but it is hers, with all its imperfections.

 _She_  is hers, with all her imperfections. She does not belong to her pain. Not here.


End file.
